MLB: How baseball has changed over the decade

Shifting strategies

In 2009, Joe Madden, then manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, was the only guy even experimenting with shifts. The idea of unbalancing the standard defensive alignment was so far off the accepted grid that not until 2016 did Baseball Savant even begin tabulating MLB shift frequencies.

That season, teams shifted on an average of 13.7 percent of plays. By then, the Houston Astros were the game’s shiftiest team, using the maneuver on more than one-third of their defensive opportunities.

Ironically, Madden – by then nursing Chicago’s North Siders to their first World Series title in more than a century – largely disdained the maneuver he had brought into the baseball world. The champion Cubs employed a non-standard alignment only 4.6 percent of the time, fewer than all but one MLB team.

Fast-forward just three seasons. By 2019, the rate of shifting had nearly doubled, to a full one-quarter of plays across all of baseball. The Astros shifted 49.4 percent of the time, yet they did not lead the majors because the Dodgers exceeded a 50 percent shift rate.
Eight teams shifted on more than one-third of their plays, which is to say more than any team had done just three seasons earlier.

Joe Maddon? By 2019 the shift’s popularity had increased his frequency to 12.7 percent, three times the Cubs’ rate from 2016. The world was unimpressed; in 2019 Maddon’s Cubs were baseball’s least likely team to employ a shift.